Windows Vista

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What an interesting thread this is. I count about 13 distinct people posting, and, is it only two or three of those that actually have/are using it?

The users all(?) say they are less than impressed. Galacial, about to send it back and... maybe it was only two.

All I've seen of it so far is the rather tame/lame TV ad. Microsoft's website doesn't seem to have anything much to say about it (other than telling you about the huge combinations of versions you can pay for).

I certainly can't use it on this machhine, as I only have a puny 512M RAM, which is only just enough to run XP. I don't think my GeForce2 would be good enough, either. Hold on, I'll just rotate my Beryl (free) cube of desktops on my Linux/Ubuntu (free) system to conveniently get to an XMMS player (free) and change tracks while my newly downloaded Synaethesia (free) draws pretty pictures. I also want to run up either Quanta (free) or Seamonkey (free) to edit the HTML that I can get from OpenOffice (free) which I'll import a silly MS .doc file to. Then I might do some C#/.NET programming in MonoDevelop (free) or C/C++ in KDevelop (free). Oh! This is silly. They're all free. Name anything, but a game, and it's free. There are even a smattering of games, these days.

If you want Halo, forget Linux. I don't even like Halo. Tried it, got annoyed with its pointlessness within a minute. Spent a while doing all the things you are not supposed to do - that is the one with the stupid barrels you can pick up isn't it? I spent about 1/2 hour winding up my NT friend by insisting on carrying a barrel round with me all the time. They're so hard to hold onto, as well. Every time you go through a door, if you clip your barrel on the door jamb, you drop it. Then you (I) have to pick it up again. Then you can throw it at guards, until you annoy them enough to kill you. Exciting.

Do you know of a good freeware program to replace Outlook 97? I can't function without it, unfortunately (due to my needs for knowing exactly what my calendar is doing at any given time etc.). I tried Mozilla's calendar function, but didn't like it.

Palm desktop perhaps. I'm pretty sure you can download it for free, the software doesn't give you reminders though.

I suppose you mean the old Mozilla suite calendar. The new one is Sunbird. I've used it a bit. It's only at release 0.3.1, so you have to put up with a few bugs.

Under Linux, as well as the old Mozilla and the new Sunbird, I seem to have these immediately available: eGroupWare-calendar, phpGroupWare-calendar, webcalendar or xcalendar. I haven't tried any of them.

Thanks. I didn't mean to hijack the thread. I'm just annoyed at Microsoft in general.

Microsnot? What's that?

Sometimes I think Vista gets bashed on too much. After hearing all the bad things, I had a secondary machine with decent specs (2.4 GHZ, 1 GIG RAM) with a failed drive and decided to load it with Vista Enterprise. (Did not cost me anything but time since we have a Microsoft Software Reassurance contract.) The machine didn't need any 3rd party drivers as all the drivers were built in Vista (which was nice since loading XP was a pain on this machine with it's SATA controller.)

I have to say, that I was delightfully surprised in the stability and speed even with the Aero interface. The machine has run like a champ with no problems. The only annoying things are the black screen flash before one of those protection screens come up to verify you are doing something to the system and not some spywear. The only serious bug encountered is that one of the LCD monitors (running dual 19 inch monitors) sometimes looses some color after the screen saver. Turning the monitor off and on fixes it. (And it's hooked up via DVI connector.)

The machine is stable as a rock and we had 24 Internet Explorer windows running with different heavy resource websites (MSN, Yahoo, Engadget, etc) and the machine didn't miss a beat. We did the same thing on the same hardware with XP (We have 3 identical machines in the office) and it choked big time and slowed to a crawl. I believe XP has been patched so much that it's lost a lot of performance it once had.

However I am very disturbed with the DRM in Vista and I have a machine at home I do some video work with and it will be a while for that gets changed to Vista. My machine in my office I plan to put 64-bit Vista on it. Even though there are no speed advantages (according to different tests) there are memory benefits. The only problem is finding a good high speed scanner to work with Vista. Third party driver support on Vista is very lacking right now.

One person mentioned a new Dell with Vista and problems. I would bet that most of those problems are due to 3rd party garbage Dell installs on their machines. (I've seen the same thing happen on XP.) I would try a clean install (not a restore disc) from a Vista Disc.

-Scott

Vista is certainly an easy target.

I changed to XP (pre-SP1) from W95, because I did not see any advantage in all the ones between. Other than a minor hiccup and re-install right at the begining, I was happy with it.

Recently, my XP bacame so creaky, I was forced to re-install again. A nightmare. The new installation is still dodgy.

I'm delighted to hear a report, from you, of at least one person who is (fairly) happy with Vista. However, you do seem to be in a minority.

In order to use Vista, I would have to replace all my current kit, as it just isn't up to it.

At some point, I guess I want to try it out, but I certainly find your comments on DRM off putting as well.

I'm unsure what 24 copies of IE is supposed to test. Nothing springs to mind. I ran 240 copies of SuperBasic on a Sinclair QL ten years ago. It was pretty. It proved my scheduler was working.

I must say I'm rather fascinated by the "black screen flash" you mentioned. I hadn't heard anything about that. Somehow I don't think I could handle it. I regularly cover up animated gifs in order to stop them freaking me out. I have to do that with some people's avatars, which makes it hard to concentrate on reading what they've written. If the whole screen were to flash... nope... I don't think I'd like it one bit.

PS tallfreak - I wasn't meaning your avatar! Yours is excellent! It does distract me a little, because it's so neat!

Yours is nice, slow and smooth. A joy to behold. (I meant to compliment you on it the first time I saw it!).

I also don't mind the one's with the long period, sneaky, tiny, trick flashes.

It's the fast/flashy/abrupt/disjointed things that bother me.

next comp I get will probably be an x86 mac

I'll probably go with osx, boot camp, xp, and win 98 <if I could get a vm to run dos and win 3.1 that'd be nice>

that being said I will probably upgrade this one for five years before I replace it

Got my new Dell just now - firing it up - let's see how Vista works this time around....

Lau,

The black screen flashes are only on security questions so it's only when your installing programs and drivers and not day to day use. The reason the 24 web pages was significant is that web pages with lots of Javascript and flash can be big resource hogs and Vista just seems to manage these better. After a while in XP, the buttons in IE turn black and new windows will refuse to pop up. No matter how much RAM you have XP can't utilize more than 2 Gig (although it will recognize up to 4 Gig.) (Except for 64-bit XP). Vista can use up to 4 Gig and 4-bit Vista, much much more.

-Scott

That would be me. Got Dell number 2 today, started it, ran the program that gave the initial error message on Dell number 1 (Windows Calendar and don't even get me going on what a crappy piece of software that is), made one calendar entry, restarted Dell 2, and...same error message as Dell 1.

Was about to call Dell and request XP till I read your post...

Scott: When you say to do a clean install, can I use the disc that came with the computer? It is a Vista disc but put out by Dell.

Last edited by MsTriste on 07 Mar 2007, 2:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I can watch it for minutes at a time - it's mesmerizing...

1gb of ram what that’s stupid who cares what it looks like its only an operating system so long as it runs my games I don’t care if its black and white. Its like an Olympic athlete so covered in ‘bling’ that it can’t even walk

my advise: the cheapest way to buy a computer is from a custom shop in fact what im doing is building my own and getting parts straight from supply its easer than it looks. as for vista well buy xp first for about a year or so till vista becomes cheaper and better and you need it then by vista